1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to network communication and, more particularly, to resource allocation for network communication.
2. Background
Information communication provided by various forms of networks has nearly become ubiquitous in the world today. Networks comprised of a plurality of nodes in communication using wireless and wireline links are used, for example, to carry data packets which may convey many types of data payload, such as voice data, multimedia data, alphanumeric data, graphics data, etc. Accordingly, the nodes of such networks may comprise computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), phones, servers, routers, switches, multiplexers, modems, radios, access points, base stations, etc. Data packet flows are established between the network nodes to provide desired network communication, wherein the end-to-end data communication for any particular communication session may utilize multiple hops (i.e., be routed through one or more intermediate network node). Any number of the network nodes may be contending for network communication resources for providing such flows at any particular point in time.
A transmission between a pair of network nodes (e.g., wireless network nodes) may cause interference with respect to communications of one or more other network node (e.g., interfere with another transmission between a different pair of network nodes), if these transmissions overlap in time, frequency, and space domains. Hence, the success of such transmissions might only be ensured if they are separated in at least one of the aforementioned domains. A number of techniques for providing resource allocation for shared access to the network communication links may be implemented to facilitate network communications, such as frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), spatial separation/isolation, etc. In a TDMA system in which the frequency domain is not utilized for providing communication orthogonality, for example, time and space domains may be explored with respect to different transmissions in providing resource allocation for avoiding communication contention (e.g., TDMA operations and spatial reuse options explored for interference avoidance).
Providing allocation of resources (e.g., allocation of time slots and/or data path routing in the aforementioned TDMA system example) for facilitating network communications is generally not as simple as determining if sufficient data capacity is available for use in communicating a particular node's data in any one network link. The applications for which data communication is provided (e.g., streaming and/or high definition multimedia services in WiMedia based ultra-wideband (UWB) networks, see ECMA-368, “High Rate Ultra Wideband PHY and MAC Standard,” 2nd Edition, December 2007, incorporated herein by reference) may be bandwidth intensive and delay sensitive and thus have strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. Accordingly, a data path with sufficient available resources at each node along the data path is needed to support QoS requirements of a data flow over multiple hops of a network to guarantee QoS over the end-to-end data path.
Previous solutions have proposed TDMA scheduling schemes that are centralized implementations which are not suitable for distributed media access control (MAC) protocols, such as those of WiMedia based UWB networks. Some such previous solutions are variants of QoS aware routing protocols, while other such previous solutions have used integer linear programming in an attempt to solve the problem of supporting a desired flow.